Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women's Work and Households in Global Production

摘要

This collection's subtitle aptly captures the editor's objective: to make visible the diverse ways in which women's labor is woven into the production networks that structure the world capitalist economy. As Wilma Dunaway points out in her lively and pointed introduction, although most scholars of commodity chains acknowledge the concept's origins in world-systems theory, and many even cite Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein's (1986) definition of a commodity chain as "a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity," far fewer follow Hopkins and Wallerstein in insisting that these networks encompass not just the activities directly related to the production of a commodity, but also "the reproduction of the labor forces involved in these productive activities." The failure of most mainstream commodity chain analysts to examine gendered labor (particularly reproductive labor) in global production networks has produced the theoretical and empirical lacunae in the literature that this volume seeks to rectify.